Wednesday, 10 June 2015

I've always been a TV series-addict, since I was a child scanning weekly TV guides to see where in local commercial channels I could find reruns of Star Trek TOS.

Therefore, I've always been subject to the tantrums of show schedule: the order of episode broadcasts, the schedule, even the fact that all episodes were ever to be broadcasted.

And I’m not speaking of 70s and 80s TV series, when there was no real continuous story to tell, and missing one episode (assuming it was not the final one) was no big issue.

Just to name an example or two, back in 2005 and 2006 two great series first seasons were broadcasted by Italian national public broadcasting company, Rai: Desperate Housewives, first season and Rome, first season.

The former had the schedule anticipated a couple of times without proper notice. Not bad, for such a thrilling season based on continuous intertwining developments of the plot.

The latter, co-produced by Rai, just stopped at the end of the first season, for the second and final one was never broadcasted.

Years have passed and meanwhile satellite Tv has changed the rules of the game, putting more power into the hands of series-addicts and trying hard to keep the pace.

Yet the real rule-breaker of the recent years, Netflix, kept out of Italy, while entering the European market.

About time! As you can easily imagine, Italian nerd TV-series addicts* have welcomed the news with much enthusiasm.

And Netflix has made her #epicwin management of the situation, starting a conversation on Twitter with Italian fans, in Italian, as in the example below.

I have still a couple of terrible doubts about the success of the operation, though: the digital divide as for bandwidth is still high, even in Northern Italy, even in towns; and will Netflix be able to win the battle of contents and rights with Mediaset and Sky?

Anyway, I cannot but rejoice: marking October in my calendar, gathering supplies, spreading garlic on my ADSL router to drive the demon of low bandwidth out of it, and preparing for my next binge-watching, hoping it will be such a masterpiece as House of Cards.

For this is how you eat the whale of show schedule: one Net-bite at a time.

*Any resemblance to real events and/or to real persons, living or dead, or cited in a tweet, is purely coincidental